Question / Help OBS Video lagging without any dropped frames or bitrate issues

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eirgor

New Member
Hi,

Recently I've been having trouble with my OBS lagging with a setup I've used for a few months without issue until now. The preview window and the video of the stream itself lag really badly after streaming Fallout 76 for 5-10 minutes. Other games such as Path of Exile or Elder Scrolls Online or World of Warcraft do not have the issue. My webcam and audio do not lag at all and I do not have any dropped frames and my bitrate remains stable through all the lag. My CPU usage occasionally bumps up to 100% but not frequently and it lasts only a few seconds each time. The lag is constant once it starts so it does not seem to coincide with those peaks of usage. I am currently running a 2 PC setup:

The gaming PC has an Intel i9 9900k, 16 GB of ram and a Geforce RTX 2070.
The streaming PC has an Intel i5 3570, 16 GB of ram and an AMD Radeon 7900.
The capture device used is an Elgato Game Capture HD(External).

Attached is a log of a 5-10 minute test stream i did where I was able to replicate the lag issue I've been having. As a side note, I have zero lag within the game itself, this is purely the video side of things, and as stated before it ONLY effects the actual video of the stream, not the audio of the video feed coming from the Elgato nor the webcam video or my mic audio. Another note as I just thought of it at the tail end of writing this up, I have also tried changing out all of the cables used with the Elgato with no improvement.

https://obsproject.com/logs/haE6PLWmwIWnZZqb

Thanks in advance for the help, let me know if there's any more info I need to provide,
Eirgor
 
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eirgor

New Member
So I had thought that the issue had fixed itself after updating Windows from my test stream but when I went live for my actual stream the issue presented itself once again about 15 minutes into the stream, so as it stands I'm still in the same situation as my original post.

Here is the log from the most recent attempted stream:

https://obsproject.com/logs/BDmjYHs4qrcnlFI1
 
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Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
Don't see anything obvious. There is no rendering lag listed.

8:15:01 PM.381: adding 85 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 170 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:15:01 PM.443: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 192 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:15:56 PM.930: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 213 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:20:08 PM.789: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 234 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:23:20 PM.557: adding 42 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 277 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:23:58 PM.475: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 298 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:24:07 PM.725: adding 256 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 554 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:24:07 PM.788: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 576 milliseconds (source: Elgato)
8:24:07 PM.788: 8:24:08 PM.020: adding 42 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 618 milliseconds (source: Elgato)

Increasing amounts of audio buffering from a capture device usually indicates general system overload, or else a problem with the capture device or driver. The amount here is significant.

If you're ever hitting 100% CPU that is going to cause problems.
 
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eirgor

New Member
After doing an hour long test stream with no issues it would seem that, with your assistance to think of the solution, I have found the problem. Your comment about audio buffering and 100% CPU usage spurred me to try turning off my recording through OBS and switch my streaming encoder from CPU to GPU (previously I had the stream on CPU and the recording on GPU and would run both.). After doing this my CPU seems to run at about 40-50% steady and GPU runs at a solid 50% while streaming. Tested for an hour as I said with zero issues so far. I will give this a tentative 'I've fixed it' and keep testing things for now. Thanks for the assistance, it's greatly appreciated and hopefully this will be the last post needed here due to the issue being truly resolved!
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
You're welcome! Some GPUs may also be able to run two encoding sessions without additional load; you may just get slightly lower quality from it at a streaming bitrate than you would from x264 on your CPU. YMMV.
 
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